Anton Stuebner is an arts writer based in San Francisco. He received his Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of California, Berkeley (2010) and his Master of Arts in Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts (2014). His current project examines visual cultures of embodiment during the AIDS crisis and explores how cultural constructs of bodily totality became increasingly destabilized through advancements in video and imaging technology in the early 1980s. He has presented his research at California College of the Arts and at the Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

His writing appears online through Art Practical (where he is a regular contributor) and in print through Metalsmith magazine. Additionally, he serves on the development committee of the San Francisco Arts Education Project (SFArtsEd). He previously interned at Romer Young Gallery as a gallery assistant and voluteered at Creative Growth Art Center as a development and administrative assistant. Contact at astuebner (at) cca.edu

About Anton Stuebner's Thesis Project

“Embodiment Blues: Refiguring the AIDS Body through Gestures of Plurality in Derek Jarman’s Blue” postulates that critical misinformation during the early years of the AIDS crisis led to a visual culture that imagined the paradigmatic AIDS body not only through visual markers of disease but through culturally normative tropes of white male embodiment. This essay then argues that Derek Jarman’s film Blue critically intervenes in this culture by advocating for a mode of representation that is un-raced and un-gendered (and potentially un-classed). In doing so, Jarman’s use of a saturated blue screen functions as a visual intervention into mainstream narratives centered on the imaging of the AIDS body. At the same time, this essay examines how Jarman’s audio and textual narrative signals a decisive injunction into these forms of representation through moments of slippage in both the film’s sensory experience and narrative address. These slippages critically signal the need for an ethics of AIDS representation that accounts for a plurality of embodiments and lived experiences that current cultures of mainstream representation preclude.